SPRFG 10

Chapter 10

Koreatown of the Ilgentavita Empire (3)

Hwanhee stretched out her legs and lay down on the large bed. Looking out the window, she could see snow piled up here and there. It was winter. Servants were walking around the large garden attached to the mansion, clearing away the snow. The tree branches were bare, but she could smell flowers coming from somewhere. Looking closely, she saw that her—Aiolia’s—room was decorated with vases full of roses in full bloom. They must have been growing the flowers in a greenhouse or buying them from the southern regions. Either way, it must cost a great deal of money. She felt a little overwhelmed.

‘Since I’ve possessed a character in a romance-fantasy novel anyway….’

Should she just live happily while acting spoiled with her loving parents? From what she could tell, this Aiolia seemed to have an older brother who cared very much about his younger sister. Or perhaps she could use the advanced science and technology of a modern twenty-first-century person to create some revolutionary invention and make a fortune. She could meet a handsome man and fall in love, or she could try learning the magic that existed in this world. As long as she did not die young from some infectious disease, there were so many things she wanted to try and enjoy.

Hwanhee smiled.

She could not truly smile from the bottom of her heart. She had thought possessing a character in a romance-fantasy novel would be nothing but wonderful, but now that it had actually happened, she was completely bewildered. First of all, she did not know why or how she had become the daughter of a duke in a romance-fantasy world, so she felt frightened and frustrated.

‘In some novels, the original owner of the body explained everything. Or the god of that world would appear and tell the protagonist what they had to do here. If not that, there would at least be a status window…. Why do I have none of that?’

Besides, she had read so many romance-fantasy novels that she had no idea which one she had possessed a character from. It might not even have been a completed novel. It could have been a story she had dropped after reading only the beginning. Maybe she had only watched bits and pieces of the webtoon without reading the original novel. Perhaps it was not even a paid work, but some fanfiction posted on the internet.

Oh, God! If you were going to dump me in an unfamiliar world and then pretend you knew nothing, you should have at least told me the title!

Hwanhee cursed at the god, whose existence was uncertain, and whose identity, if it did exist, might or might not be the same as the author.

And then she fell asleep.

When was the last time she had slept on a bed like this?

Even if this was not Hwanhee’s own body, her soul had been starved of sleep and rest for so long that she had no intention of giving up the precious opportunity to take a nap. Hwanhee slept so deeply that she would not have noticed even if a shamanistic ritual had been held beside her or someone had carried her away.

Once again, she did not dream.

Even after sleeping all day and opening her eyes, she was still in Aiolia’s room, not in her apartment in Korea.

It was already night.

After sleeping as much as she wanted, her mind finally began working in a different direction. Out of habit, Hwanhee felt around the bedside for her smartphone.

Of course, it was not there.

That was not surprising, since no one in this world would have a smartphone.

‘I have to go to work…. I must be terribly late….’

Hwanhee was both a graduate student and a teaching assistant. Except when she was attending classes, she was supposed to work as a teaching assistant in the department office. In return, the university waived her tuition and paid her a salary of 300,000 won a month.

There was a lot of work and not enough teaching assistants, so she actually worked very long hours. However, the money she received was legally considered a scholarship rather than wages, so there was no problem even though it violated the minimum wage law.

Anyway, this teaching assistant position was not something just anyone could get, so Hwanhee went to work every day at nine with a grateful heart.

If she was lucky, she left work at seven. Usually, it was around eight. After grabbing some dinner, she studied whatever she needed to study.

‘Ah, there must have been so many calls to the department office…. And to my phone, too. I feel so sorry for Ms. Haeun. What should I do? The professors must be really angry. And the other university staff….’

Even on the day before she woke up in this romance-fantasy world, she had gone to and from work as usual.

‘No, I went to work. But did I… leave work?’

A chill ran down the back of her neck.

She could not remember.

People often forgot small things like whether they had turned off the boiler or locked the door properly before leaving home, but something about this felt ominous.

Hwanhee tried to retrace her memories. Memories were not naturally arranged in chronological order, so she had to make an enormous effort to put them together.

Her last memory was waking up because she received a phone call from a professor.

She had barely managed to fall asleep at dawn after preparing for class when the professor called and gave her some work instructions.

Was it 1:30 a.m.? Or was it 2:00?

She had said, ‘Yes, Professor. I understand. I’ll take care of it as you instructed as soon as I get to work tomorrow morning.’

Then she had gone back to sleep.

She had never imagined that when she opened her eyes again, she would be in a romance-fantasy world.

‘What on earth happened?’

In many romance-fantasy novels, the protagonist traveled to another world because of a traffic accident. In the past, there had been many novels where people crossed dimensions in their original bodies, but these days, reincarnation stories, where the original body died and the person was born again, or possession stories, where they took over the body of someone who was already living happily in another world, were more common.

Even if it was not a traffic accident, regression, possession, and dimensional travel happened frequently.

There was a girl who was blown away by a whirlwind and arrived in a fantasy world, and there were four siblings who opened a wardrobe door and met a talking lion. What difference did the method really make?

But among all the fantasy novels Hwanhee had read, no one had ever been suddenly thrown into another world after losing their memories and sense of self.

Even Alice, who fell down a rabbit hole and arrived in Wonderland, at least did not forget that she had been chasing a rabbit.

‘What is this? Give me back my memories….’

She had a strong feeling that something extremely important had happened in her life.

Something irreversible.

‘I heard that when people go through something too painful for the brain to handle, the brain can erase the memories by itself.’

While Hwanhee was lost in serious thought, her stomach growled.

Come to think of it, she had not eaten anything all day.

She put on her fur slippers and opened the bedroom door. She cautiously poked her head outside.

There was no one in the hallway.

She slowly began walking.

She had come out, but she had no idea where the kitchen of this house was.

Hwanhee stopped for a moment and stared into the air as she tried to remember where the kitchen in her own home had been.

It had been an ordinary apartment, and it had not been this large.

The kitchen had been only five steps away.

When she tried to recall her original memories, it felt as if there was static inside her head, so she had to force herself to push the thoughts away.

Instead, she searched through Aiolia’s faint and weathered memories.

Aiolia did not know where the kitchen was either.

Well, a noble young lady probably had no reason to ever visit the kitchen.

If it had been daytime, she could have stopped someone and asked, or followed the smell of food to find the place.

But it was night, and the house was such a huge mansion that the word royal palace seemed more appropriate.

Hwanhee changed her mind and decided to simply admire the house.

If she found a large room somewhere, she planned to enter it and see if there was any leftover food.

Suddenly, she remembered a book she had read in the past.

Rooms in large mansions usually had devices for calling servants.

For example, there might be a rope that, when pulled, rang a bell connected to another room, causing a servant to come.

There had even been tricks using such devices in the Sherlock Holmes series.

As she slowly went over her fragmented memories, she thought it might have been better to simply look for such a device in her room.

However, the very next moment, she thought it would be rude to summon people at such a late hour when she did not even know what time it was.

So she decided not to return to her room.

In fact, she could not have returned even if she wanted to.

She had gotten lost.

If she had another chance to meet Aiolia’s parents and talk with them, she thought she should explain once again that she was not Aiolia.

If possible, she also wanted to apologize.

It was not her fault, but the real Aiolia had disappeared anyway.

If she asked them to pray that they would surely find their daughter, she thought they might also tell her to make sure she returned to her original world.

Step.

Step.

Footsteps came from behind her.

She turned around.

She wanted to see if it was Aiolia’s father, just like the saying that goes, “Speak of the devil and he appears.”

It was a young man wearing pajamas.

His short hair was parted at the front of his forehead, and it was softly curly.

His hair color was different, but his violet eyes were exactly the same as Aiolia’s.

His face was so delicate that, since there was no distinction between men’s and women’s pajamas, he almost looked like a woman at first glance.

The arm holding the candlestick and his bare legs showing beneath his chemise were smooth and firm.

He looked like a healthy and energetic young man.

‘……So she really does have an older brother!’

The son who resembled the mother and the daughter who resembled the father faced each other.

Without even having to deliberately dig into Aiolia’s memories, Hwanhee had no trouble recognizing him.

“You’ll catch a cold. Why did you come out?”

The young man spoke to her.

Hwanhee answered.

“Because I’m hungry….”

No matter how much she thought about it, she still could not get used to this voice and this language.

At that moment, the young man’s eyes widened.

He looked at Hwanhee.

He looked at those eyes that were not hers, yet were blinking because of her.

He looked for a long while at her messy, curly hair, the way she was crouching with both hands clasped around her knees, and her pajamas with nothing over them.

Enough time passed for him to swallow three times.

“You are not my sister.”

The young man spoke.

This time, it was Hwanhee’s turn to be surprised.

“Father told me roughly what happened. He said my sister Aiolia had been sleeping all day. Father thought she was simply being strangely capricious, but I do not think this is a trivial matter. Who are you?”

“I… I am….”

Even though he told her she was not his sister, the young man’s attitude toward her was as warm as if she were his real younger sister.

He said she would be cold and brought a blanket from somewhere, then wrapped it around her shoulders.

He also said that the servants might see her and guided Hwanhee to his own room, while continuing to speak politely to her as though she were someone he had never met before.

Hwanhee did not know how to introduce herself, so she could not say much.

The man’s name was Adriano.

He also explained that when Aiolia was young, her tongue was too short to pronounce his long name properly, so she used to call him “Adan, Adan.” Even now, she still called her older brother Adan.

Immediately after saying that, the young man corrected himself.

“Until yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday, I went to Aiolia’s room. I thought you would be asleep. I sat beside you for a long time, holding your hand while you slept. I suppose I do not even know if that was Aiolia’s hand. That child woke up for a little while.”

It was surprising to hear that Aiolia had somehow regained control of the body while Hwanhee was unaware.

Even though she felt it was rude, Hwanhee asked,

“What did you talk about?”

“Just something between siblings.”

Hwanhee did not ask any further.

For some reason, she felt more comfortable with him dismissing it as ‘something between siblings.’

Adan had recognized from the very beginning that she was not his younger sister, and he had treated her and his sister as separate people.

She was deeply grateful for that.